Jeremy - Unfinished and The Pink Notebook

This season we are bringing a new festival to Dream Theatre. It is called THE PINK NOTEBOOK and will focus on a playwright's unfinished work. The festival will consist of 5, fully directed, pieces of plays that have been "given up on" by a Playwright... The goal is for the Playwright to see "once and for all" if the script is still alive inside them.

I've been looking at some of my Dead Shows wondering what I want to choose. I was depressed to see how many there were...

But what to pick?

Braces Down: (once called The Racist) about a Skinhead and his Black Neighbor who through some terrifying events come to respect, and almost love, one another. (I finished Act One and then it died.)

Lysistrata: About a new take on the play where there are no men and the women are artificially inseminated by this psychotic woman who, since she has all the semen and a huge revolver, that she is the alpha male and do whatever she likes. (It died because I strayed so far away from my original idea of writing a new version of Lysistrata, that I backed myself into a corner.)

The Afterlife of Captain Hook: I use to dream about finishing this one, but one night I just couldn't have the dream anymore...

Army of the Sun: about chimpanzees living in a preserve that decide to reject the human's food and revert back to hunting tribes and cannibalism. It died because one person said "I don't get it." That's a stupid reason to not finish, but at the time, it was enough.

Audience Annihilated: about a theatre where a massacre had taken place during the only performance of a play written by a girl who immediately killed herself, and a group of actors, years later, who decide it would be an amazing idea to put the play up again. They're wrong. (Died because... I don't even remember...)

And so many more... Almost 60...

Is it right to try and resurrect a dead script?

I've always believed that the best way for me to write was to be able to know when to let a script die and not flog it for months and years. If it dies, then it wasn't meant to be. Your ideas aren't dead though- they'll just be incorporated into a better idea.

But! I can remember the joy of falling trough the paper with a lot of these, and I just want to make sure that I did the right thing. Hell- at worst- it'll just be nice to see 10 pages of whatever I choose up on stage for a few final performances before returning to the grave forever.

I believe that this festival will be a pretty profound experience for all of my fellow playwrights. So get ready to submit that dead work in a few months!

And then we'll just have to see what happens...